Democratizing the World 1 Torture Victim at a Time

Democratizing the World: One Torture Victim at
a Time

Analysis of
the Long, Repulsive History of the United States Inflicting
Torture on Its "Suspected Enemies" (in Conjunction with a
Review of A Question of Torture by Alfred W.
McCoy)

Psychological torture, sleep deprivation,
brutality, severe sexual humiliation, and murder summon
visions of a dank dungeon in a remote region of pre-invasion
Iraq, Iran, or North Korea, replete with evil inquisitors
and hooded executioners. However, those manifestations of
horror did not spring forth from the Axis of Evil. They are
actually drawn from official post-9/11 US policy. Despite
its fabled commitment to human rights, the United States
government has been committing and enabling acts of torture
for half a century. Not even Superman had the power to
snatch “Truth, Justice and the American Way” from the
crushing jaws of imperialistic ambition and
avarice.

Ironically titled, Albert McCoy’s A Question of Torture probes and exposes
the extent of “the Land of the Free’s” involvement in human
torture over the years. Only a mainstream media 90%
controlled by five major corporations (whose executives and
major stockholders are amongst the de facto rulers of the
America’s so-called republic) could so effectively maintain
the illusion that the United States is the world leader in
protecting human rights. Somewhere out there, David
Copperfield is burning with envy. Rest easy, David. They are
running out of magic. Destroying our Constitution and
reversing the humanitarian gains achieved by millions of
Americans with a social conscience throughout our nation’s
history , the Bush Regime is extinguishing the candle of
hope America once offered to humanity. Despite the
exhaustive efforts of the media handmaidens, people are
taking notice.

Painstakingly slow ascent....high
velocity decline

From our nation’s birth, many fine
Americans labored vigorously to attain a higher moral plane
by ending slavery and advancing the rights of children,
minorities, women, and workers. Contrary to the fairy tale
of America’s benevolent government “of the people”, many
amongst the plutocracy and emerging corporatocracy fought
the American evolution of human rights tooth and nail.
Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and company have taken that resistance
to new heights and are plunging the United States into an
abyss of evil, at home and abroad. Minority Americans,
Native Americans, and citizens of other nations have been
aware of this descent for years, even before the Neocon
catalyzed acceleration. However, as the ruthlessly brazen
disciples of Strauss have fervently attacked human rights,
many amongst America's indoctrinated White working class are
smelling the coffee, and it is not the best part of waking
up.

On March 8, 2006, the US State Department released its
Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2005,
in which it detailed human rights abuses occurring in over
190 nations. In an act of supreme hypocrisy, they excluded
themselves. As one can readily discern simply from reading
McCoy's expose' of human torture committed by the United
States since 1950, the United States is far from being a bastion of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit
of Happiness".

" Torture is evil, pure and
simple," is the powerful lesson Peggy Piel imparted to
her son, Alfred McCoy. Having spent a year of her childhood
in Nazi Germany, this erudite Jewish American knew a bit
about the subject of torture. Despite his mother's
moralistic viewpoint, McCoy penned his examination of the
history of torture committed and facilitated by the United
States in a detached, analytical manner, without imposing a
moral judgment. Noting over 30 pages of sources, McCoy
meticulously researched his chilling glimpse into America's
Heart of Darkness, yet still maintained relative
objectivity. No easy task in light of the virtually
countless egregious violations of human rights and acts of
murder committed by the American Empire and its
proxies.

Abu Gharib was simply a sign of a "few bad
apples"....or was it?

In 1950, the intelligence
organization of the “leader of the free world” began to take
a strong interest in research involving psychological
torture.

McCoy summarizes:

“From 1950 to 1962, the
CIA became involved in torture through a massive
mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret
research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a
billion dollars annually—a veritable Manhattan Project of
the mind.”

While the United States was trumpeting
its deep devotion to universal human rights, the CIA was
busily developing and funding research to yield “new and
improved” torture tactics with which they could extract
information from Cold War enemies. Utilizing its unique
capacity to wield tremendous power clandestinely, the United
States’ intelligence juggernaut infiltrated and exploited
hospitals, divisions of the military, and universities to
enable its research.

Many of the nauseating acts of
inhumanity depicted in the Abu Gharib photos reflect the
rotten fruits of CIA labors. Years of study and
experimentation determined that torture involving physical
pain lacked efficacy. The CIA found that strong subjects
usually responded by stiffening their resistance and weaker
ones often gave false information just to end the pain.
Psychological torture, including sensory deprivation,
sensory disorientation, assault on personal identity and
self-inflicted pain appeared to provide a much richer yield
of information. The Abu Gharib photos are a window through
which one can view the CIA-created world of psychological
torture. Hooding, stress positions, extreme intimidation
with ferocious dogs (for which a soldier was convicted on
3/21), and sexual humiliation are recurring images in the
Abu Gharib pictures and are powerful examples of CIA torture
protocol. Other techniques of psychological torture the US
military and CIA have used on detained suspects in the “War
on Terror” are sleep deprivation, isolation, and dietary
manipulation. As the Command Responsibility report by Human
Rights First indicates, 45 detainees in the US “War on
Terror” have been murdered or have died as a result of
physical abuse. As McCoy argues, there is a fine line
between psychological torture and physical torture, and as
the American Gulag has demonstrated, torturers usually cross
that line.

As an aside, it is important to remember that
there are currently over 14,000 “suspected terrorists” or
“enemy combatants” in US custody. These individuals have
been charged with no crime and have been denied due process.
Guilty until proven innocent. Now that is justice the
American way. Abu Gharib is only an aberration because the
torturers were caught. Inflicting severe psychological and
mental anguish on suspected enemies of the Empire is now
official policy and has taken place at Bagram Air Base, Camp
Cropper, Guantanamo Bay and throughout the American Gulag.
As for the McCain Anti-Torture Law, Bush and his fellow war
criminals are already inventing ways to circumvent it.

Abu
Gharib is simply a public display of the psychological and
physical torture the CIA has been implementing and
practicing for years. From 1962 to 1974, the CIA sharpened
its talons through a federal entity called the Office of
Public Safety, a branch of US AID. According to McCoy, the
OPS trained one million police officers in 47 countries. Not
surprisingly, it was not long before these same law
enforcement entities began committing severe human right
rights abuses and acts of torture.

"Practice makes
perfect"

It was morally repugnant enough that the
United States killed three million Vietnamese civilians in
their imperialistic escapade into Southeast Asia,
euphemistically labeling them as “collateral damage”.
However, McCoy describes torture policies and techniques
which resulted in the murder of tens of thousands more
Vietnamese. The Phoenix program was implemented by the CIA
to eradicate the Vietcong underground. Under CIA
administration and supervision, the PRUs (aka Provincial
Interrogation Centers) of the Phoenix program degenerated
into a collection of South Vietnamese murderers, thugs and
criminals who accepted bribes, presumed guilt based on
gossip, and murdered their detainees after they completed
their interrogation. Ultimately, (if one is gullible enough
to take the word of former CIA director William Colby), the
Phoenix program murdered 20,587 “Vietcong”. Saigon’s
government puts the figure at 40,994.

Educating them
on the finer points of torture and murder

The CIA also
bears responsibility for the creation of SAVAK, the Shah of
Iran’s ruthless secret police force. SAVAK killed 20,000
Iraqi “dissidents” during the Shah’s reign. In the
Philippines, CIA instruction resulted in 3,257 murders and
35,000 victims of torture by the Ferdinand Marcos
regime.

After its defeat in Vietnam, the United States
government infiltrated Latin America with a vengeance (to
stop the spread of the “Communist threat”). Project X,
represented another CIA endeavor to impart their wisdom in
the arts of torture to ruthless US allies Not satisfied with
their 1963 torture manual called Kubark, the CIA
wrote a sequel in Spanish entitled Handling of Sources,
Interrogation, Combat Intelligence, and Terrorism and the
Urban Guerilla.

Of the sequel, McCoy
writes,

“Apart from these cold-blooded tactics of
kidnapping, murder, beatings, and betrayal, the manual
evidences, in its 144 single-spaced pages, an amorality, a
studied willingness to exploit an ally without restraint or
compunction, hardened on the anvil of the Vietnam
conflict.”

Once located in Panama, an odious US
Army institution known as the School of Americas (sometimes
called the School of Assassins) bestowed the CIA’s torture
wisdom upon hundreds of Latin American military officers.
The School of Americas fell under the auspices of Project X
and provided the “hands on” training to accompany the CIA
torture manuals. Interestingly, by 1983 the CIA had begun to
re-emphasize the use of psychological over physical torture
when it wrote its Human Resource Exploitation Training
Manual. A laundry list of CIA-trained Latin American
military personnel and dictators murdered and tortured
hundreds of thousands thanks to the tutelage of Project
X.

Of war crimes, evasion of responsibility and
impunity

McCoy notes that the United States took a
break and out-sourced torture to its allies throughout the
1990’s. Unfortunately for the world, the Bush Regime
opportunistically seized 9/11 to begin its PNAC inspired
quest for global military dominance. In the process, the
administration implemented torture as official United States
policy. Desperately attempting to fend off critics and
preserve the crumbling façade of moral superiority,
America’s ruling class has sacrificed several from amongst
those near the bottom of the food chain. However, calling
the prosecution and conviction of a handful of military
personnel justice would be a farce. Those ultimately
responsible for America’s abject torture continue to act
with impunity.

As McCoy has vividly illustrated, America’s
“grunts” at Abu Gharib and throughout the American Gulag
were acting under the orders of the Bush Regime and under
the supervision of the CIA:

1. On September 11, 2001,
George Bush told Donald Rumsfeld and his staff, “Any
barriers in your way, they are gone.” When they reminded him
of legal constraints, Bush shouted, “I don’t care what the
international lawyers say; we are going to kick some
ass.”

2. Six days later, Bush authorized the CIA to begin
rendition of terror suspects to nations known to commit
torture.

3. On November 13, the President determined that
Al Qaeda suspects would be denied access to domestic or
international courts.

4. Close to the end of 2001, Bush’s
Justice Department approved the use of “sleep deprivation
and deployment of ‘stress factors’” for counter-terror
interrogation.

5. Bush decided the Geneva Conventions did
not apply to his “War on Terror” on January 8, 2002.

6. On
January 9, 2002, John Woo of the Justice Department crafted
a memo denying application of the Geneva Conventions and the
US War Crimes Act to suspected members of Al Qaeda and the
Taliban, whom he characterized as “enemy combatants”. Since
they were now neither soldier nor citizen, the articles of
the Geneva Convention barring “cruel treatment and torture”
and “humiliating and degrading treatment” did not apply to
them (according to Yoo’s perverse logic).

7. As Afghans
captured in the “War on Terror” started populating
Guantanamo Bay prison on January 11, Donald Rumsfeld stated
that those “unlawful combatants do not have any rights under
the Geneva Convention.”

8. On January 18, the man Bush
later elevated from White House legal counsel to Attorney
General (for his loyalty to the Empire) informed the
President that the Justice Department “had issued a formal
legal opinion concluding that the Geneva Convention III on
the Treatment of Prisoners of War does not apply to the
conflict with Al Qaeda.”

9. The following day, Rumsfeld
advised his field commanders that “Al Qaeda and Taliban
individuals under the control of the Department of Defense
are not entitled to prisoner of war status for purposes of
the Geneva Conventions of 1949.”

10. January 22, 2002:
Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee presented Alberto
Gonzales with a 37 page memo which outlined the means to
implement “coercive interrogation” without legal
consequences, affirming that “neither the federal War Crimes
Act nor the Geneva Conventions would apply to the detention
conditions of al Qaeda prisoners”, and that Bush had the
Constitutional power to suspend US treaties with
Afghanistan.

11. Behind the scenes, Bush and Rumsfeld
approved an SAP or “special-access program” within the CIA.
By its very nature, only a handful of top level government
officials are aware of the existence of an SAP. This
particular SAP endowed the CIA, Navy Seals, and Army Delta
Force with the power to assassinate, kidnap and, of course,
to torture. Concurrently, the CIA began creating the
American Gulag by establishing secret prisons in places like
Diego Garcia Island and Thailand.

12. The Bush
administration entrusted the CIA with “operational command”
of its long coveted “War on Terror”, which enabled the
United States to abandon FBI and military restrictions on
torture.

13. In August of 2002, Bybee, Yoo, and Vice
Presidential counsel David Addington created another Justice
Department memo “legitimizing” torture. Employing reasoning
which defied the laws of reality, this trio determined that
federal law and the UN anti-torture conventions only
prohibited torture that was “specifically intended to
inflict severe pain or suffering, whether mental or
physical.” They concluded that to be a crime, the torture
must “be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying
serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment
of bodily function, or even death.” Utilizing this memo, the
CIA could evade responsibility for torturing “enemy
combatants” simply by claiming they were attempting to gain
information rather than to inflict pain. The memo also
constructed a very strict definition of psychological
torture, interpreting many CIA techniques as legal. Most
significantly, in defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision
in Youngstown Sheet and Tube et al vs. Sawyer, Bybee
and his cohorts asserted that restraints on Bush’s
directives to interrogate would “represent an
unconstitutional infringement of the President’s authority
to conduct war.”

14. At about the same time as the release
of the Bybee memo, the Justice Department gave the CIA
classified permission to utilize harsher interrogation
tactics than the military, including water boarding, a
practice which leads the victim to believe they are
drowning.

Bush and his murderous cabal gave the
authorization, the CIA provided supervision, and the
military carried out the “coercive interrogation”. A
Question of Torture sheds significant light on the
culpability of Generals Miller and Sanchez in implementing
the policy of inflicting excruciating psychological and
physical pain on “enemy combatants” throughout the military
prison system in Iraq, the nation America “rescued” from
Saddam Hussein. America’s leaders condoned torture and
ordered their subordinates to carry it out. In the tradition
of monsters like Pol Pot and Idi Amin, they revel in their
endless access to money, power, and immunity. Small wonder
much of the world hates the American Empire, and its de
facto rulers in particular.

Playing with
fire

The CIA has repeatedly demonstrated that they are
slow learners. Brutality, abuse, and torture, whether
physical or psychological, are not only gross violations of
a person’s inalienable human rights; they are ineffective
means of extracting information or modifying behavior. The
FBI is one of the few federal law enforcement or military
entities not implicated in the web of torture emerging in
the “War on Terror” and, according to McCoy’s research, its
agents’ legal, humane interrogation tactics were yielding
respectable results before Bush superseded them with the
CIA.

Besides lacking value beyond its capacity to satisfy
a primal urge for revenge, torture is a double-edged sword
which harms both perpetrator and victim. McCoy points out
that committing torture intoxicates one with power.
Organizations and governments engaging in mass torture
deteriorate as the rule of law and respect for humanity
disintegrates, breaking down their political and social
structures. Objectifying and inflicting suffering upon
helpless human beings leaves deep scars upon the souls of
the torturers and creates monstrous sociopaths Contrary to
the wishful thinking of the Bush Regime, the United States
will reap a bitter harvest once the noxious weeds of torture
grow to maturity.

Realistically, except in the minds of
those who tenaciously cling to their indoctrination from the
American Empire, there is no question that the United States
egregiously violates human rights on a frequent basis. For a
more thorough examination of the cancer of torture ravaging
the United States, read A Question of Torture by Alfred
McCoy.

*************

Jason Miller is a 39 year old activist writer with a degree
in liberal arts. When he is not spending time with his wife
and three sons, researching, or writing, he is working as a
loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and
an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights
Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or
comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.

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